Adrienne Maki’s artistic practice merges sculpture, painting, and design into a singular formal language that pushes painting beyond the flat picture plane. Primarily a sculptor, Maki’s curved, symmetrical supports reject the rigidity of the square canvas while retaining an underlying structural logic, resulting in paintings that feel bodily, architectural, and industrial all at once. Across these dimensional surfaces, she explores painting as an extension of form rather than mere decoration, using pours, slashes, ovoid shapes, and restrained gestures that follow the contours of the structure itself. Her work is deeply informed by modernist and postwar design histories, particularly Italian Spatialism, mid-century architecture, Japanese and Danish modernism, and the democratic ideal that aesthetic experience should permeate everyday life. Influenced by figures such as Lucio Fontana, Agostino Bonalumi and Gio Ponti, she approaches color and composition with an emphasis on immediacy, restraint, and “effortlessness,” seeking surfaces that feel both deliberate and instinctive.
Adrienne Maki (b. 1997, San Francisco, CA) received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI. Selected solo and duo exhibitions include Wolfpack HQ, Los Angeles (2026 with Lee Mullican); Super Super Markt, Berlin (2025 with Omari Douglin); Room 3557, Los Angeles (2022); and Sebastian Gladstone, Los Angeles (2022 with Omari Douglin). Maki’s work has been included in group exhibitions at Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2026); Theta, New York (2023) and Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art, Fall River (2021). Maki lives and works in Los Angeles, California.